This is from our guest poster Bruce Kesler -
What if Peter, or Paul, is your son?
If Peter is your child, then you might think at least twice about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Indeed, if Paul is your child, you might think twice about when Peter runs out of money to rob.
Today, we’re moving beyond robbing to literally looting Peter, and Paul will face standing on his own.
Our older, unionized industries centered around the domestic auto companies are yammering for federal tens of billions to keep them breathing a while longer. Meanwhile, their smothering, very generous retirement pension and healthcare benefits are, at best, likely to be hardly trimmed.
Our states, whose heavily unionized employment has grown faster than in private companies, face almost $2 trillion of future payments on retirement benefits for which they don’t have funding. Add in localities and the unfunded debts climb even higher. Meanwhile, our governors clamber for hundreds of billions from the federal government to keep their mini-welfare states going with, at best, small temporary spending cuts.
Our federal government faces the imminent bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security under the weight of trillions of unfunded benefits. Meanwhile, nothing is done, while the remedies become more severe. Add to this the trillion dollars or so, hidden behind misleading titles like “stimulus” or “growth”, already committed and more to come to briefly cushion the shock to some politically favored sectors.
Where is all this money to come from?
It can only come from four sources: It can come from increasing taxes or cutting future government benefits, both of which land on our child Peters, and the latter on our Pauls, to reduce their standard of living and their incentives to excel and produce. It can come from foreign and domestic lenders, the debt payments mounting and interest costs increased by the reduced credibility of repayment in non-inflated dollars. It can come from speeding up the currency printing presses, devaluing investments and savings. It can come from our Pauls learning to more care for themselves.
At a point in the not too distant future our Peters may well no longer have enough resources left to be robbed for the Pauls.
Our Pauls better learn, fast, how to be more productive and care for themselves.
We have a pretty clear choice: The first choice is we can continue the fiscal and moral insanity of robbing Peter to pay Paul, of the impossibility of sustaining our heavy subsidies of so many currently over-benefited adults.
Or, we can redouble and redirect our efforts to provide a practical education to our Pauls. That means several things. It must be made clear, throughout our society, which includes our Hollywood and Times Square dream factories, that there is no free ride, but that an individual is dependent upon his own work and ethics. It must be made clear that diligent attention to skill-enhancing education is the road to self-sufficiency. It must be made clear that any individual, company or government which doesn’t live within its means has no other choice but to do so, at whatever adjusting discomfort to oneself, owners, employees or clients.
The first choice, of fairly blithely continuing on the current path, downward, will soon hit a dead, self-destructive end. The second choice will then not be a choice to be managed but the only harsher way remaining. The sooner we head toward the second path, the easier the way will be.
The first step is to recognize that both Peter and Paul are our sons, to be cared about enough to be set on the right path.
